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Posts from the ‘Rock music’ Category

Oct 13

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The Island story, pt 3

Every year or so there’s a little reunion of people who worked at Island Records in its early and earlyish days, held in a pub near the offices in St Peter’s Square, Hammersmith, to which the company moved in 1973. The most recent of these family affairs was a week ago, and it coincided with the publication of the third volume of Neil Storey’s mammoth Island Book of Records, an illustrated oral history of just about everything that went on to make the label what it was and became. Mammoth in the depth of research that goes into documenting every release on the label and its associates, albums and singles, no matter how seemingly insignificant, and mammoth also in its sheer physical proportions.

Each volume is 12 inches by 12 inches, hardbound with sturdy covers and good paper. This one has 480 pages, and you would not want to carry it up too many flights of stairs. It covers only two years, 1971-72, when the company was headquartered in Basing Street, Notting Hill, but what years they were: Traffic’s John Barleycorn, King Crimson’s Islands, Fairport Convention’s John Babbacombe Lee, Free Live!, the first solo albums from Sandy Denny, Richard Thompson and Jim Capaldi, Cat Stevens’s Teaser and the Firecat and Catch Bull at Four, Nick Drake’s Bryter Later and Pink Moon, the Harder They Come soundtrack, and the debut of Roxy Music. Also a torrent of albums from the sort of bands that ZigZag readers loved: Spooky Tooth, Mott the Hoople, Free, Quintessence, Uriah Heep, the Incredible String Band, Vinegar Joe, Juicy Lucy and Bronco. Not to mention Claire Hamill, the Sutherland Brothers and Amazing Blondel. And Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

Storey’s interviewees range from musicians, backing singers and executives to promotion people and sales representatives, designers and photographers. Everyone has interesting stories to tell, be they founder Chris Blackwell, A&R chief Muff Winwood, the producers Joe Boyd and Paul Samwell-Smith, the art director Ann Sullivan (a rare woman at this stage of the story), the photographer Brian Cooke, the publisher Lionel Conway or the engineers in the label’s studios, including Phill Brown, Tony Platt and Richard Digby Smith. There are frequents shafts of illumination, like the great engineer/producer John Wood on John Martyn: “John always wanted to be something he wasn’t.” Or the late Mike Kellie of Spooky Tooth, summing up Island’s early-’70s vibe by describing the Basing Street offices, with their famous non-hierarchical round tables, as “a home away from home.”

These years also saw the birth of the HELP label, a cut-price line for compilations, live albums and experimental projects. It took its name from ELP, whose live recording of Pictures from an Exhibition was its first release, followed by Ashley Hutchings’ Morris On, King Crimson’s Earthbound, John Surman’s Westering Home (the forerunner of his ECM albums), Stomu Yamash’ta’s Come to the Edge, and others.

The one that interests me most is Tibetan Bells, a project by Henry Wolff, Nancy Hennings and Drew Gladstone, an unlikely project which ended up selling quite well. Tony Platt’s description of solving the problems involved in recording bells and bowls is both enlightening and entertaining. And David Betteridge, who took over as the company’s managing director in 1971 when Blackwell felt like spending less time in the UK, gives us a sharp little reminder of the modus operandi at even the most seemingly enlightened and progressive of record labels: “The sleeve was a damned indulgence with that special inner bag… but don’t forget that at the end of the day the costs of that were recouped. We weren’t that stupid. The artist paid out of the royalty for that sort of indulgence.”

There’s a delightful description of the 1972 visit of Johnny Nash and Bob Marley to a school in Peckham, South London, where they give the pupils an impromptu concert — and where Bob played football with the boys. And it’s Marley whose arrival gives the book its postscript: an account of Blackwell’s first meeting with the Wailers, of his decision to advance them the money (£12,000, as I recall) to make an album which he would then market as of they were a rock band, and of how he felt when he heard the first results of his gamble, at Harry J’s studio in Kingston, where a new future would begin.

* The Island Book of Records Vol 3: 1971-72 is published by Manchester University Press, price £85. The curious object sitting on the book is a ceramic by Bryan Ferry, who presented it to me with his tongue in his cheek and a little label (now lost) saying ‘Roxy Music Rock Critic of the Year Award 1972’. The piece of paper under the book is the original typescript of the feature I wrote for the Melody Maker that year on visiting Jamaica to listen, with Blackwell, to the first recordings from the Catch a Fire sessions. Normally I chucked the carbon copies of my typescripts away; this one I kept.

Oct 5

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Another Lifetime

Fifty-odd years later, the original version of Tony Williams’ Lifetime remains the most exciting band I ever saw. At Ungano’s in New York in the autumn of 1970, the three-piece Lifetime, with Larry Young on Hammond organ and John McLaughlin on guitar, produced a howling noise that seemed to take music into the next dimension.

It was jazz, it was rock, it was somehow psychedelic, it was all of those things and none of them, with the burners turned right up. In that time and place, made by a trio of innovators, it was the sort of music that made you reach for the word ‘beyond’. It also made everyone else’s attempts at some kind of jazz-rock fusion sound like Muzak.

Their double-album, Emergency!, had created a bit of a stir, but its appeal was seriously undermined by very dubious sound quality, as if they’d used poor-quality equipment and had left the final mix to the studio cat, and then pressed the result on twice-recycled vinyl. Listening to it was a bit of an ordeal, which is not how it should have been at all.

The day after I saw them, I interviewed Tony in his manager’s office. He was less than communicative, something I reflected in the piece I wrote for the Melody Maker, suggesting that it might have been at least in part the fault of my stupid questions. He was reading the newspaper as I walked in and said hello, and he barely looked up from it for the duration of our talk.

It wasn’t a lack of sympathy on my part. I’d been an admirer since he became the drummer in the Miles Davis Quintet seven years earlier, aged 17. I’d devoured the albums he’d made for Blue Note, both under his own name and with people such as Jackie McLean, Eric Dolphy and Andrew Hill.

Maybe it was me, maybe it was the day, maybe (as I took the liberty of suggesting in my piece) he was still learning how to handle fame. Whatever, I left in disappointment but with just about enough to turn into something publishable.

When I asked him about the murky sound quality of Emergency!, mentioning that someone close enough to know had told me it came out exactly the way he wanted, he gave a somewhat puzzling response: ‘Oh no, that’s not true. Wait a minute. Did someone tell you that? Well, write down that it’s true. I got tired of clear things — everyone was recording with the same sound, and I didn’t have time to experiment before going in there, and that was the best way to get a different sound. Just distort it and make it fuzzy.’

But now, finally, 56 years later, someone has sorted it out. For its release on the Reference series of reissues from Werner Uehlinger’s Thingamajig label, Emergency! has been subjected to a process of sonic restoration and mastering by the Swiss engineer Michael Brändli which reveals, for the first time, the music that was always there. Clearing away the fog while leaving some of the distortion and fuzz has turned it into what I heard at Ungano’s, and what Tony must have had in his head, if that’s not too presumptuous a claim.

If you ever shared my reservations, listen to the way McLaughlin’s epic guitar flights, Young’s completely original approach to the organ and Tony’s dramatic contribution to the three-way conversation (which sounds as if he might have been listening in a very creative way to Keith Moon) now emerge with light shining on every component part. It’s still not polished — this was never going to be polished music — but it’s much easier to appreciate.

During our conversation, Tony also mentioned that Jack Bruce was joining the group. In London two years earlier, after Cream had broken up, Bruce recorded a quartet album with McLaughlin on guitar, released in 1970 as Things We Like. Now he seemed to have found a perfect berth, and during Lifetime’s UK tour that November they stripped the paint from the walls of the Marquee in front of an audience containing many well-known musicians, who were suitably gobsmacked.

Jack was now doing the singing, as well as playing bass. Tony had sung with the three-piece line-up, and he wanted to keep a vocal element in the band. He told me that he’d sung doo-wop as a kid in Boston, and made the rather surprising claim that his own vocal efforts were inspired by Arthur Prysock, Nat King Cole and Billy Eckstine. But then Lifetime was a surprising band on every level. I wish we’d got on better that day, but nothing has ever dimmed the memory of the night at Ungano’s, which now has its perfect souvenir.

* Emergency! is reissued on the Thingamajig label, containing the uncredited photograph used above.

Jul 28

15 Comments

Waiting for a friend

When I first met Lenny Kaye in 1970, his two immense contributions to contemporary culture were still in the future: (1) his compilation of the profoundly influential double album Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-68, released in 1972, and (2) his founder-membership of the Patti Smith Group, which he helped the young poet to put together in 1973 and in which he’s still active whenever they reconvene, as they did so memorably last year for the 50th anniversary of Horses.

We met in New York, introduced by our mutual friends Richard and Lisa Robinson at a time when Lenny was working at Village Oldies on Bleecker Street and writing rock reviews for various publications. Somewhere I have copies of his two solo 45s: “Crazy Like a Fox”, released on the Hollywood label under the pseudonym Link Cromwell in 1966, and “Child Bride”, which came out on Mer Records in 1980 under his own name. Now — not before time, you might think — comes his first solo album*, titled Goin’ Local and just released on Yep Roc Records, based in North Carolina and the home of Dave Alvin, Tift Merritt and others.

It was worth the wait. These dozen songs have a (mostly) straightforward warmth and clarity, ranging from the no-frills roadhouse boogie of the opening title track — for my money, better than anything on the new Stones album — to the touching ballad “Yes I Will”, dedicated to his late friend Andy Paley and adorned by a discreet string arrangement from David Mansfield, which ends the album.

Lenny sings sometimes in a confiding semi-whisper, sometimes in the New Jersey drawl of a kinder, gentler Lou Reed (particularly on a sweet song called “Pennsylvania Girls”). He keeps the arrangements simple, generally confined to himself on guitars, Tony Shanahan on bass, and Mark Sacco, Jeff Berg or Jay Dee Daugherty on drums. One or two other guests show up, among them the mandolinist John Jackson on “If I Were You” and, most surprisingly, the avant-jazz pianist Matthew Shipp on “Let’s Make a Memory”, adding texture to a Fourth-of-July dawning-of-romance song of bitter-sweet resonance: “My hand on your waist, your hand on my knee / Trying to understand who we want us to be…”

Lenny keeps his own lead playing mostly under wraps, although there are a couple of eight-bar solos on “A Friend Like You” that made me think of Mark Knopfler. More generally, to my surprise there were times when I found myself reminded of John Prine, James McMurtry and John Hiatt in the comfortable command of a familiar idiom, and the lack of a need to overstate anything. “Solstice”, a co-write with Patti, has the most poetic lyric, “World Book Night” the most amusing: there are “…books you have to study / And books that are so rare / And books you give to someone / To show how much you care.”

So here we are, in the photo above, sitting on the steps of the Island Records headquarters at 22 St Peter’s Square in Hammersmith in, I think, 1974, when Lenny, on a visit to London, was looking every inch the future rock star in his shades and slim-cut jeans (obviously I hadn’t got the memo yet). Next time I see him, I’m going to tell him that he hasn’t changed a bit.

* See Mike Scott’s comment, below.

Jul 2

14 Comments

John Hiatt says goodbye (maybe)

Last night’s gig at the O2’s Indigo was prominently billed, John Hiatt pointed out, as being part of his Farewell Tour. “If I come back next year,” he said, “what are we going to call it?” Or words to that effect.

I’m inclined to think that whoever thought up the title might have been correct. At 73, quite frankly, Hiatt doesn’t have much of a voice left. The straining to hit the higher notes wasn’t helped, early in the set, when his tuning gizmo misled him into tweaking his whole guitar a semitone high. It wasn’t until a dozen of the 20 songs had gone by that his use of a harmonica revealed the error. Somebody came up with a replacement gizmo, the tuning was corrected, and the last run of songs sounded more comfortable.

So perhaps he will be back, encouraged by the warmth of the response from those who had made the journey to the ghastly O2’s more intimate performance space and who feel an enormous fondness towards a man who may never have achieved the solo stardom many forecast as he went from label to label during his early years but who, despite all the many successful covers his songs have racked up, remains the best interpreter of songs that tend to stay in the heart.

Here we had a selection of compositions dating from 1987 to 2010, plus a brand-new one, the sentimental ballad “Weightless in My Arms”. His choice included the title tracks of the albums Slow Turning, Perfectly Good Guitar, Riding with the King, Crossing Muddy Waters, Master of Disaster and The Open Road. There were the big earners: “Thing Called Love”, “Have a Little Faith in Me” and “Tennessee Plates”, which Ridley Scott used in the soundtrack to Thelma & Louise. There were beauties like “Miles to Go”, “Real Fine Love”, “Long Time Comin'”, “Thunderbird”, “The River Knows Your Name”, “Lift Up Every Stone”, “Adios to California” and “Feels Like Rain”. There was a special welcome for “Memphis in the Meantime”, from Bring the Family, the 1987 album which, with accompaniment by Ry Cooder, Nick Lowe and Jim Keltner, really established his reputation.

I was particularly grateful for “Across the Borderline”, the song he wrote in 1982 with Cooder and Jim Dickinson for Tony Richardson’s film The Border. I remember him singing it at Hammersmith Odeon with Cooder, Lowe and Keltner in 1992, when they were known as Little Village, and the effect it had. It was covered in concert by Dylan and Springsteen, and I wrote a long piece about it at the time, which gave birth in the Independent on Sunday (thanks to Tim de Lisle, then the paper’s arts editor) to a much-imitated series called Lives of the Great Songs. It’s a song to rank with Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” for its poignancy and enduring relevance.

Had this been a request show, what would I have asked for that Hiatt didn’t select from his reportoire of songs about cars, rivers and the mysteries of human heart? Oh, “Icy Blue Heart”, “Lipstick Sunset”, “Unoriginal Sin”. “The Way We Make a Broken Heart”. And “All the Lilacs in Ohio”, from his last album, Leftover Feelings, with the great Jerry Douglas.

If you were there last night without knowing anything about him, which seems unlikely, you might have been made uncomfortable by the frailty of the singing and the lengthy tuning difficulties. (But you might have enjoyed his joke about adopting Guy Clark’s approach to tuning, which involves selecting the one string that’s definitely out and tuning the rest to that.) Mostly I think, we were just grateful to see him, to hear those wonderful songs from the man who wrote them, and to say hello. Or goodbye. Or whatever it was.

Jun 9

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The mundane and the sublime

It’s hard to imagine a Beach Boys fan — a real Beach Boys fan, that is — who doesn’t have a warm place in his or her heart for 15 Big Ones and The Beach Boys Love You, the two widely ignored and often derided albums they recorded and released in 1976 and ’77 respectively in their new Brother Records studio in Santa Monica. The superficial view took them as acts of desperation following years in which only greatest-hits albums like Spirit of America and Endless Summer kept their name alive.

The first was an album of mostly covers, the second an attempt to haul Brian Wilson back into a role front and centre of the group’s activities in the studio. Both were recorded in an atmosphere of uncertainty over what they needed to do in order to reassert themselves as a creative and commercial force.

Neither album had a lot of polish, certainly not at the level of Surf’s Up or Holland, their studio predecessors. And there were certainly few vestiges of the rapt introspection of Pet Sounds or the fascinating brainstorms of Smiley Smile. Instead, 15 Big Ones and Love You came from a place between Little Deuce Coupe and Beach Boys’ Party! — only made by guys a decade older, with all the tensions the intervening years had introduced.

I liked both albums a lot, for all their rough edges, and play them often. The doo-wop/R&B covers on 15 Big Ones — the Five Satins’ “In the Still of the Night”, the Six Teens’ “A Casual Look” and Little Willie John’s “Talk to Me” — are in the class of their earlier versions of the Students’ “I’m So Young” and Bobby Freeman’s “Do You Want to Dance”. The originals on Love You — “Let Us Go On This Way”, “The Night Was So Young”, the lovelorn “I’ll Bet He’s Nice”, the witty “Johnny Carson”, the duet between Brian and his first wife on “Let’s Put Our Hearts Together” — match the quality of those on, say, Sunflower.

A new three-CD package called We Gotta Groove: The Brother Studio Years collects outtakes from 15 Big Ones, the original masters and outtakes from Love You, various cassette demos made by Brian, plus tracks recorded later in for Adult/Child, an aborted album planned by Brian as a sort of tribute to the Four Freshmen, one of his original inspirations.

Most of the Love You outtakes and alternate mixes are scarcely worth the trouble: they include a cover of “Ruby Baby” that can’t live with the Drifters, Dion or Donald Fagen, a charming-but-silly two-minute ditty called “Marilyn Rovell” dedicated to Brian’s aforementioned first wife, and an attempt to create a one-man “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling”, with Brian doing all the singing and all the playing, from drums and jingle bells to Minimoog bass and electric harpsichord. A vocals-only mix of “The Night Was So Young” exposes the beauty of Carl Wilson’s lead. “We Gotta Groove” is a very tedious track, and making it the title of the album is an idea so bad it must have come from Mike Love, who sings lead on the song. As for the 15 Big Ones outtakes, the versions of “Mony Mony”, “Running Bear”, “On Broadway”, “Sea Cruise” and others were correctly omitted from the final release.

The handful of Adult/Child tracks are curiosities and nothing more. The arrangements are by Dick Reynolds, who orchestrated the Four Freshmen albums that Brian enjoyed in his youth and who contributed charts to the Beach Boys’s 1964 Christmas album. The first of these tracks, “Live Is For the Living”, an upbeat Brian original, is almost a parody of a lounge singer’s mannerisms. A version of “Deep Purple” has nothing to recommend it. Two lovely Brian ballads, “It’s Over Now” and “Still I Dream of It”, fare worse than in their solo demo versions. As a project, it was a mistake — and it’s useful to have the proof that this was not another long-buried masterpiece.

But here’s the good news: Brian’s cassette demos for Adult/Child and Love You are something else altogether. It’s very moving to hear him at the piano singing “It’s Over Now”, “Let’s Put Our Hearts Together”, “I’ll Bet He’s Nice” and “Still I Dream of It”, all ballads, and each of which he wrote without the aid of a lyricist — no Roger Christian or Tony Asher or Van Dyke Parks. They’re almost heartbreaking in that he sounds so alone, but they’re also hugely affirming of the extraordinary creativity of his songwriting, which finds the perfect spot between Broadway-era chromatic invention and pure pop chord changes.

As brilliant an arranger and producer as he was, as innovative an assembler of choral resources and previously unheard instrumental combinations, his genius is evident even in these completely stripped-down, unadorned performances. In many of these songs (as when “Still I Dream of It” opens with the singer feeling peckish at the end of a long day before evolving quite naturally into a meditation on the eternal), he could somehow find a link between the mundane and the sublime. It’s a process that began with “Surfer Girl”, and never really stopped.

* Not wanting a version of We Gotta Groove (released by Capitol Records) that involved two CDs and a vinyl LP in a 12×12 package, I spent 40-odd quid on a Japanese three-CD release. A warning: the downside is that the accompanying booklet is scaled down, and the useful sleeve essay and very interesting recording details are therefore in minuscule type. The uncredited photograph is taken from the brochure.

May 27

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Rickie Lee Jones at the Barbican

Like Bob Dylan, Rickie Lee Jones gives a great deal of ongoing thought to how she presents her songs in terms of musical arrangement. Such care is never allowed to outweigh the feeling of freshness and spontaneity, even when the material concerned is getting on for half a century old, as were the five songs from her debut album, written when she was barely into her twenties, included in last night’s 90-minute set.

Her current touring band includes the brilliant Ben Rosenblum on accordion, piano and harmony vocals, the divine Petra Haden on violin, percussion and harmony vocals, and the very fine Vilray Bolles on Fender Telecaster. It’s a beautifully dextrous and flexible unit, capable of handling the way Jones likes to stretch songs such as the opening “Weasel and the White Boys Cool”, “We Belong Together” and “Living It Up” into woozy mini-symphonies.

Just about everything about the evening was deeply enjoyable, including her very funny introductions and digressions and a couple of wonderful extended solos on the standards she inserted in the middle of the set: deft jazz guitar from Bolles on “On the Sunny Side of the Street”, swooning accordion from Rosenblum on “Hi-Lilli, Hi-Lo”. When Haden and Rosenblum joined Jones for the high harmonies, particularly on “Weasel” and “We Belong Together”, the effect was spine-tingling.

Gradually she drew the audience into a closer involvement, which seemed to deepen when she talked about when she sang “Bonfires”, the very plain, folk-based break-up song which was written for 2009’s Balm in Gilead but sounds about a thousand years old.

The last half-hour was a beautiful slide through “The Horses”, written at the end of the 1980s for her infant daughter, the emotional exposure of “Coolsville”, the gorgeous “A Tree on Allenford” (from 2003’s The Evening of My Best Day), and, as a valediction, the immortal “Last Chance Texaco”. Pretty close to a perfect night.

* Rickie Lee Jones is at the Apex, Bury St. Edmunds, tonight (May 27), Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry on May 29 and the RNCM Theatre in Manchester on May 30.

Apr 10

6 Comments

Keith Altham 1941-2026

Next to their manager and their record producer, the most important person in a rock star’s life in the second half of the 20th century was their PR man or woman. Between 1969, when I joined the Melody Maker, and the end of the ’80s, I knew a bunch of them. Some I liked a lot and found easy to deal with. The trickier ones were easy to identify and not hard to avoid. Keith Altham, who has died aged 84, was definitely in the former camp.

There’s a very good obit by the Guardian‘s Robin Denselow here, telling the story of how Keith got into the music business, first as a writer for Fabulous magazine. He’d moved on to the NME by the time I met him, but a couple of years later he transitioned to the dark side and set up his own PR company.

He never lost his feeling for journalism or his ability to be objective about the stars he was now dealing with on a very different basis and whose antics fed his wonderful sense of humour. His book No More Mr Nice Guy!, a memoir in the form of open letters to some of his famous clients, was written and published in 1999, after his retirement; he always told great stories, and some of the funniest are here. Keith gives you a very different view of famous people, since he was capable of appreciating the talent of his clients while remaining clear-eyed about their human foibles and appreciating their contradictions.

Van Morrison: “What a talent. What a singer. What a songwriter. What a pain in the arse.”

Rod Stewart: “Having declared your great passions as ‘soccer, drinking and women, in that order’, none of them seem to have made you hugely happy.”

Mick Jagger: “…do you remember anything without the aid of Bill Wyman’s diaries? Very mean of him not to let you plagiarise them for the benefit of your own autobiography, I thought. After all, what are friends for, if not to be used? Giving back the million-dollar advance must have hurt.”

Ray Davies: “There is something of the rock and roll Howard Hughes about you. I would not be entirely surprised if you wound up a lonely old man with vast wealth in a huge house with one light bulb, growing your nails and wiping your fingers with Kleenex after shaking hands.”

By contrast, there’s the real fondness for such disparate characters as Noddy Holder, Donovan, Eric Burdon, Sting, Reg Presley (whose surname was bestowed by Keith), Justin Hayward and Marc Bolan (“Your heart was always in the right place even when you mislaid your head”). And Eddy Grant: “You are a perfect role model for any aspiring young popular musician trying to make it on their own terms, and having done so while remaining a decent human being first and a gifted artist second.”

And maybe most of all there was Pete Townshend. Despite enduring years of heavy-duty tantrums and frequently being fired from his role as the PR for the Who, the band he loved more than any other, Keith could write this: “When you were going through the hell of drug addiction and we were all at our wits’ end trying to stop you turning into the person you had always warned us not to become, I swore then that if this killer of a business destroyed you, then I would quit and become a postman or a milkman or anything. Fortunately you had sufficient mental strength to drag yourself back — and you also fortunately had friends and family who were not content to see you destroy yourself.”

About 25 years ago, Keith’s chance encounter with Tom McGuinness at an exhibition of old Eel Pie Island posters in Richmond led to a lunch date, to which each of them invited a friend from the business. In turn, that led to the biannual Strummers, Thumpers and Scribblers lunches, held in Barnes and still going strong, albeit with numerous changes of cast over the years. I’ve been attending them for two decades and treasure some happy memories, such as seeing P. P. Arnold and Linda Thompson sitting next to each other at one lunch, or earwigging a drummers’ conversation between Clem Cattini, Brian Bennett, Don Powell and Rob Townshend at another.

Keith could, of course, have written an equally remarkable book about the journalists with whom he came into contact (but who’d want to read that?). Here, they remain anonymous. But thinking about trying to get members of the national press interested in talking to one of his clients, he writes: “Most of my conversations with them went like this: ‘How would you like to interview Eddy Grant?’ ‘Latest single isn’t doing much.’ ‘How would you like to interview Eddy Grant in Barbados?’ ‘When do we leave?'”

Had he written that book, he might have included an episode from 1978 in which, as editor of the Melody Maker, I accepted his invitation to send John Pidgeon to the US to write about what I guess was the Police’s first American tour. I never promised covers, but I think that might have been the understanding. Anyway, John came back with a very good piece, and the Police were extremely hot at the time, but I also had what I thought were some good pictures of the Cramps to go with an interview, so Ivy Rorschach and Lux Interior ended up on the front of the MM that week. It was one of the most stupid editorial decisions I ever made. Keith was tight-lipped, as I recall. He’d be amused to know that, almost 50 years later, I still wake up in a sweat over it.

Cheers, old friend. See you down the road.

* The photo of Keith with Pete Townshend is from No More Mr Nice Guy!, reprinted by Blake Publishing in 2001 as The PR Strikes Back.

Mar 27

22 Comments

‘A Night for Neil’

Kokomo at Bush Hall

Neil Hubbard’s guitar was a thread that ran through British rock in the late ’60s and throughout the subsequent decades as a member of Bluesology, Wynder K. Frog, Joe Cocker’s Grease Band, Juicy Lucy, Kokomo and others, and as a hired gun all the way from Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita via Alvin Lee and Robert Palmer to Roxy Music’s Avalon and Bryan Ferry’s “Slave to Love”. He could play a storming solo, as Paul Carrack reminded the audience at Bush Hall last night, but he really excelled as a rhythm player: a master of the groove. Carrack recalled the remark of B. B. King, who met Hubbard on the sessions for his Deuces Wild album in 1997, that “you could set your watch by him.”

Last night’s sold-out event was a fundraiser for the charity researching the disease — Lewy body dementia — from which Hubbard is suffering, and which kept him away from this celebration of his career. The all-star bill opened with Hamish Stuart, once of the Average White Band, putting out some admirably funky stuff with a fine version of Al Green’s “Love and Happiness” and an arrangement of “Pick Up the Pieces” concocted for AWB’s appearance at the Montreux Jazz Festival by their great producer/arranger, Arif Mardin, and featuring the non-nonsense tenor saxophone of Jim Hunt.

Next came Kokomo, their five original members — singer Frankie Collins, singer-pianist Tony O’Malley, saxophonist Mel Collins, guitarist Jim Mullen and percussionist Jody Linscott — supplemented by those who have replaced the fallen along the way, including the singers Charlotte Churchman and Helena May Harrison and bass guitarist Jennifer Maidman. This was a classic Kokomo mini-set, including Quincy Jones’s “Stuff Like That”, Stevie Wonder’s “So What the Fuss”, the band original “Third Time Around” and Bobby Womack’s “I Can Understand It”.

Attention turned to the screen behind the musicians, where we were shown a little film of Hubbard in the home where he is currently living, playing his Gibson ES-355 with a young friend on an acoustic guitar. As Neil’s golden retriever lay at his feet, he strummed the intro to Bill Withers’ “Lovely Day” — which the live band picked up and flew with.

Carrack was next, with “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You”, “Stand By Me” and, of course, Ace’s immortal “How Long”, pub rock’s finest hour, its chorus sung back at him by the audience. By this point, the love in the room was overflowing.

Finally the stage was cleared for Roxy Music — two original members, Andy Mackay and Phil Manzanera, joined by Chris Spedding and Chester Kamen on guitars, Guy Fletcher on keys, Guy Pratt on bass guitar, Andy Newmark on drums and Jody Linscott, the night’s Most Valuable Player, plus the Kokomo singers, with Dionne Collins replacing Churchman. Kamen sang “Love Is the Drug”, Louise Marshall arrived to deliver “Avalon” and Mackay’s soprano saxophone was featured on a sultry instrumental that I think might have been “Tara”.

Then came a real coup de théâtre as we watched back-projected film of a Roxy concert from Fréjus in 1982, with Hubbard featured alongside Ferry, doing “My Only Love”, synched up (via a click track in Newmark’s headphones, I’d guess) to the live band. Two people who were unable to be with us on the night were nevertheless making their contribution. The technical manipulation worked beautifully.

To close, almost the entire company crowded on to the stage to go back almost to where Neil’s story began, with Joe Cocker’s gospellised version of “With a Little Help from My Friends”, the lead vocal bravely taken by O’Malley. The perfect end to a night that felt like a meeting of old friends, an evocation of old glories and an affirmation of… well, something or other. Something good, anyway.

Roxy Music 1982/2026 at Bush Hall

Mar 25

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The other Fab Four

Between 1965 and 1968, the Lovin’ Spoonful were the nearest America came to producing a Beatles of their very own. Their string of hits took in irresistibly winsome folk-rock jingle-jangle (“Do You Believe in Magic”, “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind”, “Younger Girl”, “You Didn’t Have to Be So Nice”), wistful sunshine pop (“Daydream”, “Rain on the Roof”), a brilliant homage to then-unfashionable country pickers (“Nashville Cats”), and a widescreen urban anthem that lives with the finest and most ambitious 45s of the mid-’60s (“Summer in the City”).

Where the Beatles came from skiffle, the Spoonful took their initial inspiration from jug bands. But they shared an inquisitive spirit and a breadth of range that made their early albums, released on the newly formed Kama Sutra label, full of pleasant surprises. Unlike the Beatles, at that stage they only had one main songwriter: John Sebastian, who was always rather more than the tie-dyed cartoon figure of Woodstock legend. It was Sebastian who laced his songs with lines such as “It’s like trying to tell a stranger about rock and roll”, “You didn’t have to be so nice / I would have liked you anyway” and “The more I see, the more I see there is to see”, and could come up with the entire brilliant lyric of “Nashville Cats”.

They also had an eccentric in the ranks: Zal Yanovsky, the Canadian lead guitarist with the goofy Ringo-type presence who blotted his copybook in 1966 after he and Steve Boone, the bass guitarist, had been busted for marijuana possession. Threatened with deportation, he co-operated with the police. The fact that it happened in San Francisco, headquarters of the counter-culture, only deepened the disfavour into which the group as a whole suddenly fell with the influential alternative press. They were from New York, too, which probably didn’t help.

For a while they pressed ahead with soundtracks to two movies by young directors, Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily? and Francis Ford Coppola’s You’re a Big Boy Now, the latter including two classics in Sebastian’s swooning “Darling Be Home Soon” and the title song, with its interludes of Michel Legrand-style orchestration. And there was a brilliant third album, Hums of the Lovin’ Spoonful, on which Joe Butler, the drummer, stepped forward to take the lead vocal on a power-pop classic called “Full Measure”, which ended up on the B-side of “Nashville Cats”. But Yanovsky soon left, to be replaced by Jerry Yester, formerly of the Modern Folk Quartet, an old associate who had actually played piano on theie first hit, “Do You Believe in Magic”.

With Yester on board, they recorded a fourth album, called Everything Playing, that sank without trace on its release at the end of 1967 despite being crammed with absolute gems, including Sebastian’s “She Is Still a Mystery”, “Six O’Clock”, “Younger Generation” and “Money”, Boone’s lovely “Forever”, Butler’s poignant “Old Folks”, Sebastian and Yester’s “Close Your Eyes” and, most impressive of all, Butler and Yester’s “Only Pretty, What a Pity”. If Hums was their Rubber Soul, this was their Revolver. But it had been a year since their last album, the bad smell from the bust lingered, and soon Sebastian was gone, claiming that his experience of the group had been “two glorious years and a tedious one.”

All that remained was Yanovsky’s wacky solo album, titled Alive and Well in Argentina and full of psychedelic whimsy, and a strange effort called Revelation Revolution ’69 by “the Lovin’ Spoonful featuring Joe Butler”, which included a powerful anti-war sound collage called “War Games” and a gorgeously lush version of “Me About You”, written by Garry Bonner and Alan Gordon (of “Happy Together” fame), which outdoes other treatments of the ballad by the Turtles, Jackie DeShannon, the Mojo Men, the Walker Brothers and others.

All of this and more — including the four tracks they recorded as a kind of audition tape for Elektra in 1965, and which got released the following year alongside tracks by Paul Butterfield, Eric Clapton, Al Kooper and Tom Rush on an album titled What’s Shakin’ — can be found in a new seven-CD box set called What a Day for a Daydream: The Complete Recordings 1965-69. Not the least of the set’s merits is a thorough sleeve note by Mojo‘s Lois Wilson. If you’ve forgotten about the Lovin’ Spoonful, or never really got beyond the hits, I can’t recommend it too highly.

* The Lovin’ Spoonful’s What a Day for a Daydream box set is on Strawberry Records. The photo of the original group — (from left) Yanovsky, Butler, Sebastian and Boone — was taken in 1965 by Henry Diltz.

Mar 18

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Ready for his close-up

Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, a biopic released in 2022, was something I felt I could do without. What turned up during the research process, however, was something else: a cache of film shot in Las Vegas and elsewhere soon after Presley’s comeback in 1969. Hitherto unseen, it consisted of unedited footage devoted not just to recording his performances but to rehearsal and backstage scenes. Here was Luhrmann’s goldmine, and he spent a couple of years turning it into EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, a 97-minute documentary which I saw at the BFI’s IMAX cinema in London this week.

There are things about the film that I’m not so fond of, such as the flash-cut montages that race through various aspects of Elvis’s life amd career: the looks, the screen kisses, and so on. It’s a way of bringing younger audiences up to speed, I suppose, and the 60-images-in-60-seconds approach probably seems perfectly normal to them. I found it a bit trashy — but of course there was something a bit trashy about Elvis, as there is about Luhrmann’s work. Neither of them, one imagines, would be averse to a ride in a gold Cadillac.

More seriously, the film is stuffed with passages that succeed in telling us more about Elvis than we already knew. Where Luhrman’s approach works, against all odds, is in eliding several performances of a single song, from rehearsal to Vegas showroom, creating a single unit of music containing several perspectives. Sounds a bit meretricious? Works beautifully on songs like “Burnin’ Love” (where we appear to be shown the first band rehearsal of Dennis Linde’s composition), Tony Joe White’s “Polk Salad Annie” and the majestic “How Great Thou Art” (although it does suggest that Elvis’s gospel chops have deteriorated since he made his first gospel album, His Hand in Mine, in 1960).

But to see him working with his rhythm section and singers is to understand how much he loved music. You can’t sing Joe South’s “Walk a Mile in My Shoes” the way he does without real commitment to the material. Or the quite fantastic medley of “Little Sister” and “Get Back”. You hate medleys? Try this one, which brings the best out of the guitarist James Burton and the drummer Ronnie Tutt — making me all the more angry that the closing credits don’t list any of the members of the rhythm section or the backing singers, all of whom are clearly having a ball working with the King. I’d heard that medley before, but to see it performed, with such skill and enthusiasm, is something special.

A couple of moments caught me cold. One is when the director isolates Elvis murmuring “All my trials… soon be over,” from the traditional song Mickey Newbury incorporated into his “American Trilogy”. Another is a snatch of Presley singing as if to himself: “I feel my light come shining / From the west down to the east / Any day now, any day now, I shall be released.” He repeats it, and then, as an aside, says the name “Dylan”. I felt I’d heard it before, and I had: it’s taken from a week of all- night sessions with his band in 1971, released in 2021 on a four-CD set called Back in Nashville.

It makes you wish he’d recorded it properly, and then it makes you think about all the great songs he should have recorded, in the best possible circumstances. Instead, as he admits in contemporaneous interview footage, he wasted the ’60s making terrible Hollywood movies at the insistence of his manager, Colonel Parker, who lurks around the fringes of this documentary in a way that tells you very clearly what Luhrmann thinks of him. Elvis also expresses regret and puzzlement at not having appeared in places like Europe and Japan — anywhere outside the USA, in fact — and we know who was to blame for that.

One or two other things: the shots of the various audiences are fascinating, particularly one wide-angle view from the back of the stage at the Las Vegas International showroom. And there’s a glimpse of Elvis in a car with the Memphis Mafia, giving you a hint of their special kind of camaraderie.

In all of this footage, which I guess is from 1970-71, Elvis is in good shape — a little fuller in the face, but not in the figure. He’s lithe and agile. In good spirits, too: always ready for a goofy laugh, or to change a lyric during rehearsals to include something mildly filthy. I know that such a documentary is the director’s construct, telling the story he wants you to know. But I really did come out of it feeling warmer about Elvis the human being, and even more regretful about the opportunities he missed.

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